TIES THAT BIND

There is something to offend just about everyone in this glossy, superficial entry in the Our Human Family series. Clay (Kidding Around Paris, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) describes how families serve four basic functions: to create and nurture children, to teach the young to become productive members of society, to share in both work and fun, and to care for the elderly. The numerous full-color, captioned photos are seldom directly linked to the text, and overall, Clay frequently employs oversimplifications: ``Partly because of the constantly changing needs of the industrialized workplace, divorce in North America has become more common than in many other parts of the world'' and ``Traditionally, boys have been preferred to girls, in great part because China's roots are agrarian and because men have held most of the economic and social power.'' Teenagers will have difficulty putting the snippets of information into meaningful context. (glossary, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-14)